


The Mind Palace

by LadyElaine



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Altean Lance (Voltron), Black Paladin Lance (Voltron), F/M, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, For lance stans in general, Genius Lance (Voltron), Lance is a dorky genius, Lotura in the background, just wanted to contribute to an underappreciated AU, there isn't enough genius lance in the world, whoa Lance is mature, you're welcome genius lance stans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 05:23:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18309047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyElaine/pseuds/LadyElaine
Summary: Sudden new Altean powers? Check.Newest black paladin? Check.Secretly a genius?Pidge doesn't even know what to think anymore when Lance accidentally slips and reveals his true abilities.





	The Mind Palace

**Author's Note:**

> Genius Lance is underappreciated, confirmed. Also, being a HUMONGOUS Lance-stan, I made him the black paladin, half Altean (plus the powers, which I think should've been the whole point to him becoming Altean). Enjoy!

Pidge was awakened by the sound of shuffling in a room down the halls of the Castle of Lions.

“What the quiznak...” she mumbled, putting on her glasses out of habit before getting out of bed to investigate. 

She followed the noise until it led to her to the door of Lance’s room? She wondered exactly what he was doing up this late, especially when he was the first one out.

She knocked on the door. “Lance? You awake?”

More shuffling, the loud sound of something snapping close, and then a muffled “quiznak”. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “I’m coming in.”

“Wait, Pidge--!”

She burst in, ready to see what shenanigans Lance was up to this time. Last time, he had stolen the junk sculptures of Hunk and Keith to play pretend teacher, dressing himself up in a white doctor’s coat. That had taught Pidge not to accidentally walk in on Lance on his free time. 

But when she burst into his room, he was not playing pretend. Lance was casually leaning against his desk, a forced smile straining his face. Odd. Nothing else appeared odd though. In fact, his room looked clean.

Too clean, she thought. “Alright Lance, the jig’s up. What’re you hiding?”

Lance gulped, not meeting her eye. “N-nothing! I’m not hiding anything!” He gave her a playful finger-gun and wink. “I should be asking why you’re so interested in my activities, though.”

Pidge gave him a side-eye, deciding to ignore how his usual flirtation made her insides queasy. “Yeah? What’s that then?” Her eyes had caught on an usual jut out of his bed. The closer she got, the more it seemed like Lance has hastily thrown a blanket over it whatever it was.

Lance stood up abruptly. “W-wait.”

Smiling mischievously, Pidge dramatically swept the blanket away. “Aha! I’ve got y-- huh?” She hadn’t known what she’d find, but she certainly wasn’t expecting... chicken scratch on a chalkboard. She frowned, squinting at it. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was almost like Lance had written in another language. 

“Quiznak,” Lance sighed, coming from behind her. 

She turned around slowly to face him. “This is what you were hiding? Useless symbols? Were you playing teacher with fake Hunk and Keith again? They must be around here somewhere.”  
Lance scoffed, sounding slightly offended. “Of course not. And these aren’t useless symbols, either.” He threw the blanket back over the board. “Just go back to bed, alright? We’ve got a long day tomorrow. Liberating the Galra, visiting Lotor and Allura on Altea, checking up on Earth’s conditions...” He let out of stream of air, clearly stressed. She was mostly able to tell because his Altean marks dimmed considerably. 

Pidge noted that this had become more and more common. Ever since Keith had decided to permanently join the Blade of Marmora, and the Black Lion had chosen Lance as the leader of Voltron, Lance has lost his trademark levity.

Sometimes, she missed the old Lance. 

She gave him an appraising look, not convinced by the thin smile he put on display for her. “Okay, I’ll go back to bed. But we’ll have to talk about these symbols, whatever they are. Promise?”

She stuck out her hand.

“Promise, Katie,” Lance said, shaking her hand. 

She withdrew, satisfied. “Night, Black Paladin.”

Lance chuckled. “Night, Green Paladin.”

 

The next morning, Pidge waited for Lance to finish his morning duties. She sat in the back of the Castle’s main control room, fixing up Beezer’s control panel, one eye on the circuitry, the other on Lance. 

Still in his pajamas and the blue lion slippers he had refused to give up, he yawned as he activated the teleduv. Coran steered the castle through the wormhole leading to the Milky Way. 

Pidge sprung up, leaving Beezer alone at the moment. Lance was finally free. There was no way she was going to let him forget about showing her his strange writing.

“Okay, a promise is a promise,” she said, grabbing onto his arm before he reached the corridors of the castle. 

Lance groaned good naturedly. “Fine. C’mon.”

However, instead of leading her to his room, he went down a completely different route. Pidge wasn’t sure she had even seen the section of the ship he was going. But she remained silence, since Lance seemed to know precisely where he was headed.   
After a few minutes of walking, he finally stopped in front of what looked like the door to a closet. 

“You ready?” he asked her, eyes glinting with excitement. She grinned, his attitude contagious. 

It reminded her of when they had gone to the space mall back when they had just started piloting Voltron. It made her smile to herself every time she thought about having spent that time with Lance alone. 

“Yeah.”

He opened to the door and she stepped through.

A shocked gasp escaped Pidge’s throat.

It wasn’t a closet. It was an arena. 

Larger than the entire dome at the Clear Day Festival. It felt larger than Honerva’s mind, and that had been humongous.

Each of the six 50ft walls were flanked floor to ceiling with chalk boards. Pidge didn’t even register the fact that they were chalkboards and where did Lance get chalk and--

“Holy crow, what is this?!” On the floor, Lance had clearly allocated himself quite the collection of essays, papers still floating through the air from the impact of the door opening. 

“I guess you could call this my mind palace,” Lance replied, closing the door behind them and stepping up next to her.

“Mind palace?” she croaked out.

“Pidge, let me ask you a question,” Lance said quietly, though his voice reverberated in the hollow of the room. 

“Yes?” She whispered this, suddenly aware of how it was just her and the Black Paladin. 

“Did you really believe I was just a stupid kid who happened to get into the Garrison by sheer luck?”

Pidge didn’t answer. She knew her silence was all the answer Lance needed. He let out a sad little laugh. 

“You know what? I’m happy you were the one to catch me trying to finish one of my equations. I don’t think Hunk, Coran, or Romelle would’ve really understood what I’m trying to explain.”  
He playfully nudged her side. “Plus, I had Hunk make some peanut-butter type cookies just in case you got hungry or something...” He awkwardly scratched his head. 

Pidge had so many questions, some of them she hadn’t even fully turned into sentences in her head. She opened her mouth to voice a few of them, but Lance put his index finger over her lips.

“Before you say anything, you have to promise to keep this a secret.”

Pidge moved his finger aside, fighting the urge to blush. “Lance, what’re you saying? That you’re secretly a genius?”

Lance cringed. “I wouldn’t go that far...”

“Then what is all this?”

Lance stared at her intently. “Mind. Palace. This is my--” 

He suddenly made a running start to the middle of the cavernous room and slid to the center, sending up a flurry of essays in his wake. He threw up his arms and grinned at Pidge. “--MIND PALACE.” 

He begin to excitedly pick up a few papers laying at his feet. “I wrote this essay when Sendak was on the ship. Invading his brain to forcibly draw out his memories! Amazing!” He flipped to another one. “Yalmor body fluids somehow shrinking us to a molecular level? Incredible! Unexplained! I had to explain it!”

He mumbled out some equations. “The math it took to confirm all this was beyond anything we’d ever seen.”

He let out a boisterous laugh. “And--can I talk about the Olkari?! Oh boy, holy quiznak, that had to be the best day of my life. You were busy connecting with nature and I-- Pidge, natural science! Natural science! It’s mind-blowing! Melding together the mind and nature is something I never thought I’d live to see.”

He pointed up at one of the walls filled with chalkboards, carrying the same odd symbols like the one Pidge has seen in his room. 

“For the last 6 years, I’ve been cultivating this huge theory. It could tie everything together! Literally everything.” He grew solemn for a second, lowering his arm. “Of course, I’m just one half-Altean half-human. I know I won’t be the one to discover the answers of the universe, but at least I can stand on the shoulders of giants.”

He winked at Pidge. “Isaac Newton said something along those lines, you know.”

Lance grinned at the walls. “There are some days where I can see everything so unequivocally clearly, it’s like I can predict the future in this reality and all the others too.”

Pidge could hardly breathe as he continued on, an embodiment on pure joy in its natural habitat. He ranted about conspiracies like he had taken lessons from Slav, his hands gesturing wildly at the symbols. His Altean marks had never been brighter and his eyes had never shined so blue. 

Pidge was spellbound. So this was Lance. This was the real Lance. His quintessence flowed around him like an ethereal waterfall. Every word he said was filled with the heat and conviction of a hundred stars. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. 

“Pidge?”

She snapped out of her ether. “Huh?”

“You’re not freaked out?” 

She swallowed. “No, I am. I definitely--”

A thought occurred to her, and she suddenly wasn’t as wonderstruck anymore. Angry was more like it. “Lance, if you’re so smart, why did pretend to be stupid for so long? Why didn’t you ever help me or Hunk with our devices? Why didn’t you help Coran fix the castle? You could’ve stopped Honerva from...” 

She trailed off, seeing the hurt expression on Lance’s face. 

“You really think I never helped you guys?” he asked, looking sideways at the floor. 

“You were so busy in your mind palace, you never thought to use your intellect to help us defend the universe.” Pidge was upset. There was so much that could’ve been done if Lance had only--

“Do you remember when you found your brother?”

Her eyes snapped to him. “Huh?”

“Matt--he was nearly untraceable. I knew that you would never find him, not with your methods anyway,” Lance explained, not meeting her eyes. 

Pidge didn’t like where this was going. “Go on.”

“When you went off-planet to collect information about him, I set up a program to analyze Sendak’s crystal. Other than information about the Galra, I managed to find history of the gladiator tournaments and its organizers. Long story, short... if I had let you keep on going, you would’ve never found your brother. You would think he was dead.”

He met her eyes now. “I couldn’t let you go through that Pidge. I wouldn’t let you go through that.”

Tears begin to sting at the edge of Pidge’s eyelids, but she refused to let her confusion show. 

 

“I know how important Matt is to you. You, and only you, had to find him. So I went ahead of you and planted those coordinates you found at his grave. I put you on the right track.”

“Lance,” Pidge started, her voice wobbling. 

“And when you came back with him that day, the look on your face was so much more reward than I had bargained for.” He smiled weakly. “Your happiness, everyone’s happiness, is my happiness.” 

He opened his arms, intercepting Pidge as she rushed into him, tears sliding down her face. “I c-can’t believe--” she stuttered, unable to speak past her sobs. 

“It’s okay,” Lance said, rubbing her back and placing his chin on her head. “You have him back now. That’s what matters.”

“Who--what else did you help?” she asked, rubbing away at her wet eyes, but still clinging to Lance. 

“Would you believe me if I said I knew Shiro was a clone from the beginning?”

She shoved Lance away, laughing. “No way.”

He grinned. “Yep.”

“How good of an actor are you?”

“I’m in the company of Shakespeare and Matt Damon.” 

She looked up at the black paladin, standing rather awkwardly by himself, but smiling warmly at her. Her face burned. 

Partly from realizing that she should probably face her feelings for him among all these discoveries. But partly from shame.

“How--how did you endure all the times we didn’t think you were intelligent enough or we made fun of you for being dumb or? All those times you helped us in the background, and you never even took credit.”

She didn’t want to cry again. But her hands trembled at her sides. “You were sparing our confidence, letting us believe that we were achieving all those things by ourselves.How could we...I, have been so blind?”

To her surprise, Lance only chuckled. “Yeah, well, I almost fooled myself more than a few times. I’m still lover boy Lance though, if that’s what you’re asking.”

She wiped at her glasses. “What do you mean?”

He cocked his head to the side. “Just because I flirted with every girl I laid eyes on, didn’t mean I couldn’t tell when one actually liked me.” 

Pidge hoped her mortification didn’t show. But knowing what a genius Lance was now, he probably read her like a book. Lance had known all along. All along, and he had never said anything. Had continued chasing Allura until Lotor, and had ignored Pidge’s feelings even though he was perfectly aware of them, even before she was. 

“Quiznak, Lance,” she whispered, placing her glasses back on her face. She cleared her throat, focusing on the boards behind him. “We should probably start heading back to the rest of the team. We’ll be reaching Earth soon.”

“I like you too, Katie.”

She almost got whiplash looking to him. “What?” She realized she had said the word “what” more times that morning than she had to the entire time they’d been piloting Voltron together. 

Lance took a step forward. “I.” Another step. “Like” And another. “You.” Another. “Too.” 

Full stop. He was 2 feet away. 

“Remember when we were on that one planet, trying to find a fuel source and you called me cute, in an “ugly” sort of way?” A little smile danced around his face. “I held onto that for so long. It was the first indication to myself that I may have feelings for you too, somewhere deep-seated at the back of my mind. But I thought maybe it was just sibling fondness.”

He placed a hand on shoulder, staring right through Pidge, eyebrows furrowed. “But when Ezor chose you to torture first, I knew right then. There was no way on quiznaking earth I was going to let her hurt you. I would’ve rather died.” 

Lance swallowed. “So, I like you. A lot.”

He bitterly laughed into his hand, gazing at her. “I can’t believe it took me this long to say it, actually.”

Even with this new knowledge, even with the sincere, honest look Lance had on his face, Pidge still believed he was just flirting.

“Don’t mess around Lance,” she warned him. “Don’t play with my feelings.”

His expression crumpled. “I would never do that.”

“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for the last 3 years?”

“I--”

“Ah, come here, you tall freak.” Pidge threw caution to the wind, bridged the distance between, grabbed his t-shirt, pulled him down to his level, and kissed him on the cheek. 

She let him go, turned around, and started to stomp away before he could see her face becoming increasingly red.

“Hey, how come you didn’t do that at the space mall?” Lance called out, laughter tracing his voice. 

Pidge turned back to face him. Lance.

Half Altean.  
Half Human.  
The Black Paladin.  
Genius.

“I didn’t know who you really were back then,” she said, after a moment of thought. 

“So who do you think I am now?” He patiently waited for her answer, leaning back comfortably in his pajamas.

Pidge wasn’t sure yet. But judging by earnest look of affection coming from Lance, she had all the time in the world to figure it out.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading this one-shot I made at 2 in the morning *looks at shaking hand*


End file.
